We present to you below a very interesting interview conducted by the folks at KillerStartups.com with Mr. ‘Brian Zuercher’; Co-Founder and CEO of the US (Dublin / Ohio)-based start-up “Venueseen”; A company that helps brands utilize visual marketing to build relationships with customers.

Brian Zuercher had a precocious interest in business for a boy from the Buckeye State. He likes his sports, too, but ever since the days of running the school store, the entrepreneurial path has beckoned him to take a road less obvious. That’s not to say his travels as a startup CEO and founder have always gone smoothly or that his vision of the journey has always been clear. But what would there be to learn–where would the satisfaction be–if an entrepreneur’s life was straightforward or easy.

Zuercher’s latest company, VenueSeen, is a toolkit for recognizing customers and interacting with them. VenueSeen collects and organizes location-specific photos shared via social media–Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, and more. Access to this content allows businesses and marketers to better engage with customers as well as take a more active role in shaping social identity.

At the crossroads of tradition and innovation, big brands and small startups, high-tech and down-to-earth, Zuercher steered KillerStartups to this peculiar Midwestern intersection and talked about how his startup emerged to coordinate photo traffic.

How did you go about starting your company? How did the idea first come to you?

VenueSeen has been in evolution as many companies are. It wasn’t the original kernel of an idea that we had. Originally, we had a product that we built called FlyMuch. That product was in the consumer travel industry and was designed to let people more seamlessly make recommendations on places to go and visit while they were traveling, and to then store and share those recommendations in the future.

As we went down that path, one of the things we started to explore closely was how to overlap a lot of the location data being generated through photography, check-ins and different things, along with the ability to transfer it via email and what not. And we started publishing quite a bit of the data. We took Instagram and mashed up location databases, and we published places like a restaurant and all of the recent photos taken inside of it.

We started doing that and we began receiving calls from some of the businesses themselves asking where we’d gotten the photos, what they could do with them, where the could share or track or do all these kind of things. At that point, we realized quickly that the person who had the most value for the product was likely to end up being the business, and honestly it had a better revenue model for us, for our infrastructure that we had here.

So, we took the feedback of people that started coming along, and then we made the decision to put FlyMuch on the back burner and go full force at delivering VenueSeen as a B to B product.

Did you find it exciting to pivot from your initial idea or was it frustrating to embrace change?

Excitement might not be the right word for what happened. [Laughs] You know it was frustrating because you’re ripping a lot of the roots out of something you’ve been working on. The team experiences a lot of resistance and pain. Ultimately, it’s about survival as a company and also delivering a product that has the most value. It was challenging. One of the layers of challenges was the decision to revamp the entire team. It really had nothing to do with many of the members. We decided that a combination of different skill sets and a fresh start was going to be necessary to properly attack the new plan.

It was tough. I will say that our transparency and our openness with everyone–we looked out for everyone, did our best to find jobs for everyone we were transitioning out–from my frame of reference, I think we tried to ease the pain as much as possible. But it’s never fun to go through that, as you might imagine.

What first drew you to technology and entrepreneurship?

I don’t have a family that has any kind of entrepreneurial or engineering background, but I’ve been an experiential kind of person. I’ve been in a lot of situations, courtesy of my parents, where I was forced to solve a problem myself or learn something myself. They were always like, “Your siblings are older, so go.” And they were like ten years older. I wasn’t that close in age to them, so it put me in a lot of situations where I was sort of catching up with everyone else.

Eventually I started my career at GE right out of undergraduate. While I learned a ton there in terms of best practices and all the goodness that comes with a really well-run company, I also really hated not feeling that my impact was super meaningful on a day to day basis.

Simultaneously, I like products, stuff, building stuff, building companies. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with business since I was a kid. I’m it if there’s ever been someone who thinks like, “I want to be in business when I grow up”–it’s not something that kids really think about. I actually did want to do this. It was geeky. I was running the school store and stuff as a kid.

As far as technology itself, it always felt like the possibilities were going to be much greater with newer things. So, I went to Rensselaer [Polytechnic Institute] for my MBA, which is a technology school here. And I took that path sort of contrarian to an MBA, as a way to really dive deep into a technical atmosphere and work mostly with engineers, trying to get a better understanding of how I could fit into that puzzle.

Columbus, Ohio, isn’t an area that we have come up on the radar often. What can you tell us about the startup community there?

It’s evolving. The city does a terrible job of marketing itself. It’s not as small as everyone thinks. There’s a million and a half to two million people in the metro area. We have at any moment the largest university in the country in the middle of the city in Ohio State, the largest private research firm in the world, Battelle. It’s an interesting town.

There’s a great workforce here. It’s a relatively new city in the Midwest, because it was never a manufacturing city. So it’s always been sort of  white collar, with service-based industry. In Columbus, the backbone was not in technology. So it’s sort of in this weird transition from businesses like retail. Express, Abercrombie, Bath and Body Works, The Limited, they’re all headquartered here. They were founded here. So we have a lot of big companies here, but the backbone of technology entrepreneurship is just sort of developing now. Ohio State is opening up, all these places are opening up [to technology]. It has a ways to go, but the infrastructure is generally young and that’s not very common in the Midwest.

Those big companies in the area you mentioned, have they been receptive to VenueSeen? [Read more...]